A product of any type receives some inspection, also known as review, before a manufacturer releases the product to a customer. Such products include software code, electronic documents, and even physical objects. A purpose of the inspection is to ensure that the given product conforms to a specification, performs in a desired manner, and is free from defects at least up to a desired extent.
The terms “inspection” and “review” are used interchangeably herein to refer to an inspection of a given product. The complexity of a review process depends on the complexity of the product that is to be reviewed, and a desired outcome of the review. For example, quality control inspection of an article of clothing to pass or fail the article is a far less complex review process as compared to review of thousands of lines of software code to analyze proper functioning of the software.
For example, the inspection of the article of clothing may require all inspectors in the garment factory to follow a five-point checklist in order to pass or fail a particular article of clothing being manufactured. A code review, on the other hand, might require different reviewers to review different code components. Furthermore, each code component might require checks of hundreds of operations and conditions, inter-relationships of code components, and use-case scenarios to determine the suitability of the component for release.